The number of international patent filings under the WIPO-administered Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT) reached 199,400 in 2012 with a 6.6% increase on 2011 which slowed down compared with the last year. China with 18,627 filings gained a second fastest year-on-year growth rate of 13.5%. PCT applications related to electronic machinery with 13,293 published applications (7.5% of the total) surpassed digital communication (7.1%) to become the largest proportion of PCT application published in 2012. Chinese enterprises saw a rapid growth wherein ZTE Corporation remained the leading enterprise with 3,906 applications while Huawei Technology Co. Ltd dropped to the fourth place with 1,801 applications.

Statistics shows that China’s patent intensive industries which mainly distributed in secondary industry and tertiary industry have an increasing driving effect on the economic growth. In addition, those industries have more factors of innovation concentrated in and appear to be more competitive than other industries. Preliminary competitions with the relative American manufacturing industries also can be seen, while the patent intensive industries are still labor intensive to some degree. Furthermore, China’s patent intensive industries have lower R&D input intensity and innovation efficiency compared to those in developed countries, and policy focused on supporting those industries needs to be reinforced.

This report analyzes the overall development of China’s science based on SCI-indexed papers and bibiometric method. The statistics results show that: (1) China has joined in world’s “the first group” countries based on the overall ranking for the first time. (2) China has made great progress in the high-quality paper production. (3) The rapid progress of China’s science is mainly owing to the growth of paper numbers, and the quality of the Chinese scientific output lags behind that of high S&T level countries.